Young Heroes
This is a collection of short stories written by authors already established in the world of young adult and children’s literature. Their works feature young heroes in thrilling adventures and in the translation to short stories within a multiverse conceit, they bring young heroes into the fold. It is, of course, as brilliant a marketing strategy as one could conceive. The entire premise of reading fiction is based upon the belief that even readers looking for escapism are first and foremost looking for characters to identify with. The unifying theme of heroic characters who are roughly the same age as the targeted reader almost guarantees that any and every reader of that target audience will discover someone who they wish they could trade places with. Young heroes for young readers is about a solid a thematic foundation as it gets.
Action
One thing that readers should not expect to discover within these pages are long stretches of contemplative narration. The multiverse in which Riordan and writers like him operate is not one constructed from those types of stories in which nothing much happens. The titles of the stories alone are enough to provide strong hints that the young heroes populating them are deserving in one way or another of the term “action hero.” “The Cave of Doom,” “Bruto and the Freaky Flower,” and “My Night at the Gifted Carnival” are not exactly titles filled with the promise of self-involved first-person narrators expending their energy on interior contemplation. Even the occasional title that may be more ambiguous in nature such as “The Loneliest Demon” actually commences with the action-packed opening lines of “Sikander Aziz! I challenge you to a duel.”
Myth and Monsters and Murder, Oh My!
To fully qualify as an action hero—or, at least, a hero engaged in action—one really needs to be dealing with a certain level of antagonist. A collection like this cannot hope to get by with stories about schoolkids battling bullies or conflict created by domestic tension between parent and child. This is the type of story collection demanding what is known in the Buffyverse as the Big Bad; creatures of myth, monsters of madness and perhaps even a murderer in the midst. “The Loneliest Demon” takes a deep dive into the backstory of the ancient mythic figure of Gilgamesh as a necessary component to overcoming the danger being posed. “Bruto and the Freaky Flower” features a title character that is a “Chupacabra puppy” and things just more monstrously freaky from there. As for murder, the opening line of “The Cave of Doom” has the first-person narrator openly expressing a desire to “incinerate Barthlomew Butts III.” Heroic assists, villains, and merely inspiration figures in these stories all arrive from the larger than life school of dramatic conflict.
